Today’s Real East Carolina Bride entry comes to us from Joylynn, a bride whose New Bern wedding is coming up in April 2017.

Well we are now less than 80 days out. I can’t believe it! It feels like just yesterday that Jared proposed to me and now we are trying to get our final numbers and checking and rechecking to make sure we aren’t forgetting anything.

In my last post I talked about how I’ve been keeping track of everything. This post will be about how we came up with our own twists on things and what things we decided to omit. Jared has very much been the ‘we don’t have to be like everyone else…we don’t have to do “traditional”.’ I have embraced this! What is traditional anyway? This day in age there are so many ways to make your wedding unique. It’s your day and your party so make it about YOU! I love the look of lace and vintage but I also wanted to include my fiancé and what he likes somehow. He is a firefighter and has done carpentry work in the past, however he didn’t want the whole wedding to revolve around his job. So, I found some ways to include what we both like without going overboard on either.

Our first not so traditional pick was attire. My fiancé is by no means a black tie affair type guy so when he asked me if we could do suits and no jackets or vests for the guys, let’s just say I think he was surprised when I said sure! Why waste the money on something you would literally wear for 30 min (not including pictures) then take off and have to try to keep track of for the rest of the night? I already knew that I wanted my bridesmaids’ attire to be something they could wear again, so it made it easier to find that when the guys would be in something that wasn’t as fancy. I am still wearing a wedding gown, but without giving too much away, it fit perfectly with my vision for the wedding.

When it came to the flowers I knew I wanted to use fake to help with the cost plus then they would last forever. In my search I found these flowers called eco flowers. They are made out of different materials such as book pages and wood. The wood ones were perfect and I love how using them along with the fake flowers gave the bouquets the look I was going for.

The next twist on tradition we did was our music. There won’t be a wedding march for this bride! I along with my bridesmaids will be walking down the aisle to one of my favorite songs by Trans Siberian Orchestra. My fiancé is not a country music fan nor is he into the slow gooshy songs. I like pretty much all types of music, so in our search for songs we ended up picking some that we both liked but you probably wouldn’t hear at the “traditional” wedding.

Next would be our cake. This is one of the places where we included something to do with Jared’s job as a firefighter. I know we have shown off a picture of our cake to a few people, but for the most part we have kept it secret. It will be AMAZING! Even though at first I wanted to do cake pops (which lately is becoming a traditional wedding cake substitute choice it seems) after I showed this cake to Jared and we had countless discussions about it because of the cost, it excites me to know that it is an element of the wedding that includes him and it will be something everyone will remember about the wedding (I hope).

The last thing that we put a little twist on was the wedding favors. Instead of sending our guests home with things they will either throw away or just plain forget, we have decided to donate that money we would use towards those favors to our favorite charities. After doing some research, I have found that this is becoming a more traditional alternative, but neither one of us has been to a wedding yet where they have done this so for us it’s different.

A few traditional things that we decided to omit completely is a unity ceremony, the bouquet toss and the garter toss. We chose to omit the unity ceremony because in its place we will be doing something that includes my three girls. We are still stewing on what this will entail, but we felt that it was a more import element to have them included and we didn’t want to make our guests go through an hour long ceremony. We decided to omit the bouquet and garter toss because we really wanted our friends and family to have a good time at our reception therefore we wanted them to have plenty of dancing time. When we both looked back at weddings we had attended this was the one thing that we both said were not our favorite parts of those night. Most people don’t embrace the fun aspect of it and they don’t want to ‘put themselves out there’ to catch a bouquet they don’t want to keep anyway or a garter the groom took off with his teeth that was so high you wonder just how high it really was.

No matter what you decide to do for your wedding, whether it be to keep all the traditional elements or to give them a twist, remember your wedding is a time to show who you and your fiancé are both individually as well as together as a couple!

We’re looking for more Real East Carolina Brides like Joylynn! If you’re interested in becoming a Real ECB and sharing your stories with the brides of Eastern North Carolina, you can learn more and see if you qualify on the application page. We can’t wait to hear about your wedding!